Trials point out best in bird dogs

Posted: Monday, January 15, 2007

CARLTON - It was close but no cigar - or in this case, no shotgun - for a Watkinsville man in a national field trial for bird dogs.

In a field of 128 dogs and their handlers from as far away as Montana and Michigan, two of Kevin Johnston's four bird dogs made the final 16 in the trial, held on 4 Star Plantation in Oglethorpe County near Carlton.

But neither Katie nor Lefty made it to the final four of the trials, in which dogs compete at finding and pointing quail, then retrieving them after a hunter shoots the birds. By the time a Michigan dog named Fritz emerged as champion of the four-day trials that ended in Saturday's twilight, Johnston was gone.

But not winning didn't matter that much, said Johnston, 42, co-owner of a family business in Oconee County, Lowe Irrigation.

It was a good week overall for 10-year-old Lefty, a German short-haired pointer soon to retire to a life of luxury, as well as 3-year-old Katie, an English setter who made it to the final eight, a good showing for the young dog.

"I was really pleased with (Katie)," said Johnston, even though her exit from the field trials was pretty abrupt.

"He got me down pretty quick," Johnston said of his opponent, "and she was pretty tired."

There was a little luck involved. The other dog got three birds in the first 10 minutes, and it was pretty much over after that, he said.

It's no accident if he sounds like a football coach.

"They're just like athletes. They go just as hard as football players," Johnston said of the bird dogs, who can be any of several breeds that will find, point and retrieve birds.

And it's not about winning the shotgun and other prizes the top dog owners get in these trials.

"This is the closest thing I can get to actually bird hunting," Johnston said. "I don't do it for any kind of money or any kind of fame, just to enjoy it."

In fact, the opportunity to hunt in an increasingly quail-unfriendly world is why these "shoot-to-retrieve" field trials exist at all, said Gary Thompson, a national vice president of one of the organizations that sponsored this week's trials, the National Shoot To Retrieve Association, or NSTRA. The Georgia trial, co-sponsored by a new Georgia conservation group called Quail Forever, is NSTRA's newest and one of five big national trials the group sponsors nationally.

Georgia used to be the quail-hunting capital of the United States, but no more, said David Healan, a Braselton real estate agent and president of the year-old Georgia chapter of Quail Forever.

In 1962, hunters killed more than 4 million bobwhite quail in Georgia, but that number declined drastically to an estimated 541,922 birds in 2003, fewer than 130,000 of them wild birds, according to the organization.

Several factors have combined to reduce quail populations, Thompson said.

Suburban sprawl and the growth of cities have reduced the amount of land available for quail to live in, and predators such as feral cats and even feral hogs have made it increasingly difficult for a ground-nesting species like quail to reproduce.

But the biggest reason for quail's decline, said Thompson and other quail hunters, may be modern farming practices.

Quail are an "edge" species, thriving in the kinds of environments along the edges where agricultural fields meet forests and among the stubble of fields left fallow over the winter.

But with the advent of mega-farms, there's less edge and not much stubble any more to conceal quail nests and flocks, called "coveys."

"If you find one or two (wild) coveys a day in a cutover area in a national forest, you're doing good. Everything in the world is against the quail," Johnston said.

The field trial works much like the NCAA basketball tournament. Hunters and dogs are paired in "braces," two hunters and dogs per brace. When their names are called, they head out together to a 35-acre field of tall grass.

Before each brace of two dogs and their handlers heads out for the 30-minute trial, a bird handler places five farm-raised quail in the field, spinning them to make them dizzy so they won't fly far away. The object is for the dogs to find the quail and point to them, then bring it back to the hunter after the bird is flushed and shot.

The winner from each brace goes on to face the winner of another brace as the field is narrowed from 128 to 64, then 16, four, two and finally a champion, like the basketball tournament.

The hunters use shotguns and the birds may be only a dozen or so feet away when they're flushed, so the shooting part isn't the hardest thing in the world.

But the trials aren't about shooting, they're about dogs, said Thompson. It's the dogs, not the hunters, who get scored on a complicated point scale that gives points not only for finding, pointing and retrieving quail, but obedience factors such as whether the dog will back off and honor another dog's find.

It usually boils down to which dog finds and retrieves the most birds. But finer points, such as how well the dog stays on point, can come into play in a close contest, Johnston said.

But on a deeper level, "this game is a bond between the dog and the handler," said Thompson, who also brought dogs from his Greenville County, S.C., home to compete.

Thompson has turned down "well into the five figures" for his 4-year-old American Brittany retriever named Doc, short for "Split Creek's Medicine Man." Doc has finished second in two big national trials, and made the final 16 in last week's trials.

"A good bird dog is just not for sale," he said.

To Johnston and Thompson, like many of the hunters here, the bond between dog handler and dog is about more than hunting.

"More are pets as much as anything," Thompson said. "If you've got a friend and a pet and a dog that performs also, you've got the best of all worlds."

For many of the quail hunters, including Johnston, selling a dog is not too far away from selling a child.

Johnston could sell puppies from his good female dogs for hundreds of dollars each, but instead, he's had them spayed. He can't bear to get rid of the puppies, he said.

"I have a hard time letting go of them," he said. "They're like kids to me and my wife."